Kolonja Izaaka is an example of a first
wave of Jewish agricultural development in Tsarist Russia. As a result
of the partitions of Poland beginning in 1791, vast numbers of Jews of
eastern Poland found themselves living on the western
outskirts of Imperial Russia. In that year, Catherine the Great issued
an edict confining Jews to the Pale of Settlement -
a
thin strip of land roughly reconstituting the former
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and including what are now Lithuania,
Eastern Poland, Belarus, Bessarabia and Ukraine.

In 1807, a statute prohibited Jews from
holding any leases on land. Thus barred from agriculture, Jews instead eked out their livings
as tradespeople, shopkeepers, moneylenders, scholars, artisans,
etc. Food
production was the province of wealthy landowners, with labor provided
by the serfs that were beholden to them.

In 1835, an edict was issued placing additional limitations on the
settlement and movement of Jews. However the edict also relaxed the
land ownership restrictions, permitting Jews to settle on government
land for purposes of agriculture, apparently to further a government
policy of developing airable land to shore up Russia's food production.
In 1848, 158 Jewish families settled on government lands, and this wave
of settlement continued until the western Russian governments abandoned
this policy in 1864.

This first wave of Jewish agricultural settlements included Avramowo,
Ivaniki, Izraelska, Galilejska, Dovgalishok, Dubrowo, Lejbishok, Leipun,
Sinajska, Pawlowa, Kurenetz and Kolonja Izaaka (possibly called Kolonja
Odelsk at its inception). Kolonja Izaaka was founded in 1849, when
the provincial government of
Grodno offered a tract of land 1.5 km
southwest of Odelsk to poor local Jews, in the hopes that they would be
motivated by the prospect of land ownership and the independence it
might bring. The land was sandy and rocky, and took years - and the
support of Jews abroad - to become productive.

Twenty-six Jewish families staked
their claim. During the first decades
of the colony's existence, the land alone was insufficient to support
the landowners; the Jews of Kolonja Izaaka often engaged in trades in
Krynki, Sokolka and Bialystok, and left tenants to cultivate the land.

Like many colonies, Kolonja Izaaka began to receive support from Jewish
organizations in Russia and abroad. The Organization
for the Rehabilitation of Jews through Training (ORT) was founded
in 1880 and
offered training opportunities for Jewish farmers. The Paris-based Jewish
Colonization
Association (JCA) granted vast sums of money
belonging to the Baron de Hirsch to Jewish colonies in Eastern Europe,
South America and the United States, beginning in 1891, to support
Jewish independence. Kolonja Izaaka was among them. With the help of
ORT and JCA, Kolonja Izaaka became a strong local producer of grains,
legumes and orchard fruit.

World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolution interrupted the
outside support received by Izaaka and other colonies. Redrawing of
borders left Kolonja Izaaka
as part of the Bialystok District of the newly reunified Poland. The
JCA was forced to scramble to create a new infrastructure to work with
the newly
created Polish government. According to a document published by the JCA
in 1931 in honor of the centenary of the birth of Baron de Hirsch, JCA
support did manage to continue in the region, including helping
settlements expand their cultivation of fruit trees and, in 1926,
introducing bee-keeping, which we know through Salit to have been part
of Kolonja Izaaka's economy. Kolonja Izaaka, referred to as Isakowo,
was
specifically mentioned in the portion of the document describing the
JCA's work in Poland in the 1920s:

From this we learn that the single road, or "allée" so fondly recalled
in remembrances of Kolonja Izaaka, was paved in 1927 or 1928, and that
the poplars lining it, still visible in satellite photos, were planted
at the same time, with the help of Baron de Hirsch funds.

Despite the seeming prosperity of the 1920s, Kolonja Izaaka fell into
the same economic depression as the rest of Europe in the 1930s. At
first the colony received loans from ORT and JCA to help with their
large tax burden, but eventually credit was halted. While conditions
were undoubtedly more difficult in the remainder of the 1930s, we have
no testimony regarding them. The Jewish colonists perished and their
homes burned at the hands of the Nazis in 1942 and the Christians were
moved to Odelsk by the Soviet government after the War.

Photo at top of page: a barn in the nearby
shtetl of Krynki. Photo by Irwin Keller, 2007. Map courtesy of Tomasz
Wisniewski.